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Susan Hefuna
Ventanas
La Vida En El Delta
Vacio 9 Guerreo y Mandoza
2002

Rose Issa in conversation with Susan Hefuna

RI: You have chosen to start this exhibitions with your black and white drawings and not with the complex conceptual, multi media works ...


Susan Hefuna
Ventanas
La Vida En El Delta
Vacio 9 Guerrero y Mendoza
2002
Rose Issa in conversation with Susan Hefuna

R.I.: You have chosen to start this exhibition with your black-and-white drawings and not with the complex, conceptual, multi-media works using digital camera that started your career in 1989. Could you elaborate on your background, how this drawing series developed, and how you reached the austerity of these apparently simple lines?

S.H.: Though I was born to a Catholic German mother and a Muslim Egyptian father, I grew up as a child in Egypt and only moved back to Germany when I was six for my education. I studied fine arts in German art academies and completed my postgraduate degree in new media in Frankfurt.
I was always attracted to the abstract form of structures - that of molecules, DNA or modules -, those details in science and biology that illuminate us about the bigger structure of life. I see similarities between my drawings, which are inspired by the shape of the mashrabiya (the old latticed wooden or stone decorative screens associated with architecture) that you see in old Cairo, and the molecular structure, especially in the joins where the lines cross each other.
In 1994, when I started to make these drawings, hidden connections and similarities between these unconscious structures became apparent. I saw them as a crossroads, an intermediate phase for connecting my ideas. Their realisation signified a visual impact and my previous structural attractions achieving a material form. In 1988 my work centred around video, drawings, and multimedia installations that became more and more sophisticated and mechanically perfect (perfect execution is expected in the West). When in 1992 I exhibited my first solo show in Egypt - a high-tech multimedia installation - one of my digital photographs of a mashrabiya screen was instantly perceived as a familiar object by the Egyptian public. Until then, all western audiences associated it purely with abstract art within the western concept. This first-hand and unexpected feedback from Egypt was a complete surprise to me. A different audience saw the essence of the work and not its reflection, without having read any of my intentions or knowing anything about my background.
From then on, my work was somehow enriched by this dual feedback: the historical, scientific, and aesthetic context of the work perceived by a western eye, and the references that were immediately related to familiar surroundings by Egyptians. The reading of the work hence depended on the codes of each culture, the same form referring to other ideas and images from the past and present. I learned that there is not one truth, but layers of interpretations or perceptions.
In terms of the actual drawing, the size of the paper is important, for I always draw my lines in one go, without interruption or re-inking. Their size is naturally related to my body s capacity to hold a line for so far and so long. The drawings started as two-dimensional, but developed into layers of paper of different thickness and translucence, so the texture was that of the superimposed layers of drawings, almost three-dimensional now, which I could see floating before me.

R.I.: You came back to photography in 1999, but instead of using modern digital cameras, you chose to work with pinhole cameras and old materials, photographing the old mashrabiyas of Cairo once again. Then you gradually moved from the details of latticed screens to landscapes. How did the transition take place, and what links the details of decorative objects often associated with urban life to the open-air landscapes that you photograph?

S.H.: Unconsciously, the structure of the mashrabiya is linked to my city life in Cairo and Germany. I started to use the pinhole camera in 1999, not only as a reaction to the increasingly high-tech demands and pressures of western productions, but also to explore and play with the old clichés of exoticism. It was an exercise in self-exorcism and also a deliberate attempt to include more imperfection, accidents, and mistakes, as in real life. Photographing palm trees in the delta, where my father comes from and where I spent most of my childhood and later my summer holidays with my family and late
brother, was an ideal setting for exploring my own visual memories. Yet these same familiar images would speak to my other side as exotic imagery. The palm trees in our family cemetery and my childhood playgrounds may look old-fashioned and ordinary, banal to other Egyptians and simply exotic and ancient to westerners, yet these places are highly charged with personal and emotional memories. Even when I sometimes put myself in front of the camera, few western eyes could
detect the incongruity of my presence in such surroundings. For although part of me belonged and still belongs to this village life, I was never an integral part of its culture, of this very familiar landscape. Evidently I remain an outsider to my father s countrymen, just as I am an outsider to westerners, a native in a picture, my hair and eyes confirming my foreignness. In both cases I remain a foreigner in a foreign land, in both countries, despite my dual belonging.

R.I.: This same landscape is present in your most recent work, where you hid your digital video camera on the roof of your family home. This two-hour film, in real time and place, and shot in one go like your drawings, is like a piece of theatre about real life at a village crossroads. In theory, your camera s observation is one that women behind a mashrabiya could make. What was your intention in using your camera like that?

S.H.: I go to Egypt two or three times a year. This time, I went with the intention of filming this specific spot in my father s village, which could be filmed from the roof of our family house, with a hidden camera, so that I could capture life as I saw it year after year, and as it has been lived for centuries. The particular spot is a crossroads of canals that provide water to surrounding fields, feeding the neighbouring farms and animals. This particular crossroads is quite busy with people, who exchange gossip on their way to work while bringing or taking their animals to the fields. There is also a timeless quality about this spot, where apparently nothing happens, and where time stands still. Egypt is full of such timeless images and activity, as if eternity is part of the present, with life repeating itself. This romantic image of life in the delta, which seems innocent and pure, hides many stories, invisible from behind the screens.
Although these images are taken with a digital camera, they still reflect an exotic , old-fashioned imagery, because the landscape has not changed much, nor the activity. The only alien image is that of myself, mingling with the locals; an outsider who is in reality part of the scenery, for I am recognised as a member of this village, even though in exile. Evidently I am an outsider in both my cultures, but nothing conveys this more poignantly than my own photographs or film. This feeling of being in exile, constantly observing, wherever I live and belong, is what permeates my work.

London, August 2002